At one point during his solo performance, Khalid Abdalla shows us a video he took on his phone during the 2011 revolution in Egypt. Early in the dawn light, the morning after the Mubarak regime shut off telecommunications in a bid to end protests, crowds march spontaneously through the streets, waving flags and chanting. Abdalla turns the camera around to capture his own reaction: tears streaming down his face.

There’s a lot of this in Nowhere, a 90-something minute show written and performed by Abdalla, produced by the UK company Fuel and running at the Roslyn Packer Theatre as part of the Sydney Festival. The work explores Abdalla’s family and personal history, set against the backdrop of rising anti-Arab hostility since the World Trade Center attacks, and taking in the Arab Spring and the Gaza genocide.

Billed as an “anti-biography”, it’s more a collection of staged selfies, or scrapbooking acted out. For all that the show purports to cover history and memoir, the love of family and friends, and world-changing acts of violence, this is very much a production that rests on the sole performer. Whether you find it powerful or interminable depends...